Decency

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT DECENCY - PAGE 2

To the interesting question posed last week-is Bobby Ray Inman wacky or is Washington really that bad? Here is the answer: Yes. Or, life being too complex to be summed up in one word: Yes but. . . - But maybe Inman wasn't being wacky; maybe he was diverting attention from something worse. - But "modern McCarthyism" is the wrong term. It's even a disservice to Sen. Joe, who isn't easy to disserve but who at least violated individual rights and human decency with honest vulgarity.

With the hindsight of, oh, a week, one can already, and with certainty, contrast our current and just-departed presidencies. The Bush inaugural was remarkable for its modesty. It was spare, restrained. No grandiloquent singer. No poet (remember Maya Angelou going on about "the Jew" and "the Sioux" at Clinton's first inaugural?). No grand and sonorous inaugural address. The address was serious, rhetorically subdued, syntactically and intellectually complex. Its themes were Republican themes--citizenship, duty, responsibility--with none of the imperial overtones of such great hortatory addresses as John F. Kennedy's.

By Arkady Plotnisky. Arkady Plotnitsky is director of the theory and cultural studies program in the English department at Purdue University | October 24, 1999

THE INDUSTRY OF SOULS By Martin Booth St. Martin's, 250 pages, $22.95 The Industry of Souls" is the story of an Englishman, arrested as a spy in the 1950s, whom the book takes from that point to his 80th birthday in the late 1990s, after years in the infamous gulag of Stalin's labor camps and then his life in a small Russian village. It is a novel about dignity and decency as essential to human relationships and human life itself, even in circumstances so cruel that they appear to make any human relationships and almost life itself all but impossible.

So Brave, Young, and Handsome By Leif Enger Atlantic Monthly Press, 285 pages, $24 A formidably gifted writer, one whose fictions are steeped in the American grain, Leif Enger, with his sophomore effort, "So Brave, Young, and Handsome," bolsters the reputation he earned with his 2001 debut, "Peace Like a River." The new book resembles its predecessor in many ways, with its beset, first-person narrator, an earnestly colloquial sensibility, a religious faith in life's essential worth and muscular optimism about the fundamental decency of human nature.

If the spinmasters imaging the world of sport ever decide to begin the mass production of a new breed of goodwill ambassador, they might want to focus on the engagingly textured Dan Jiggetts as their prototype. Consider the Jiggetts profile: Harvard-educated; Chicago Bears-toughened; media-savvy, as evidenced by his current regular assignments on WBBM-Ch. 2, all-sports talk WSCR-AM 820 and on ESPN, the cable sports network; well versed in international finance and banking; street-smart as only a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., could be; quiet but nonetheless passionate in his advocacy of personal, professional and charitable causes; remarkably affable, even and likable on a terrain all too often littered with egocentrics and vacuous pretenders.

Shame on you! What a sad picture on the Feb. 8 front page ("To bury a child with decency"). If ever there is a need for privacy, it's when you are choosing a coffin for a loved one. I really enjoy reading my daily Tribune, but I think someone overstepped the boundaries of good taste and decency that day.

The government can deny cash grants to artists because their work is considered indecent, the Supreme Court ruled, saying the policy does not violate artists' free-speech rights. The 8-1 decision said the National Endowment for the Arts can consider decency, as well as artistic merit, in deciding who gets public money for the arts. The law "neither inherently interferes with First Amendment rights nor violates constitutional vagueness principles," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the court.

Entering the debate over federal support for the arts, the Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to decide whether the government can set decency standards for cash grants to artists. The court said it will hear the Clinton administration's argument that the government can tie grant awards to decency standards without violating artists' free-speech rights. A lower court threw out a 1990 law that required the National Endowment for the Arts to consider decency, as well as artistic merit, in handing out public money.

In 1950, a man named Joseph Welch stood up to the bullying and baiting of Senator Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunt with the famous lines, "You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" And with that, McCarthy's vicious abuse of power began to unravel. One man, speaking the truth. Where is the Republican today who will show the same courage in the face of Tea Party extremism? - Erich Schrempp, Chicago

Jack Lemmon was the Tom Hanks of his generation. He was an everyman in comedy and drama, and a man who wore his decency and niceness on his sleeve. Both ordinary and complicated at the same time, he breathed a believability into all his roles.